Recently wireless mesh network products have been developed. These networks, which often use the 802.xx wireless standards (e.g. 802.11), involve a number of antenna arrangements which each provide an Access Link (AL) to users of the network and also Transit Links (TLs) which are used to pass information between the antenna arrangements which are arranged in a mesh or tree configuration. One such network is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/683,408; filed Oct. 10, 2003 incorporated herein by reference and an example antenna arrangement is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/683,301; filed Oct. 10, 2003 also incorporated herein by reference.
Traffic may stay within the mesh network, but more commonly, one or more of the antenna arrangements in the mesh network are connected to an external network, to allow users of the mesh networks to communicate with users of other networks, to access the internet etc. The antenna arrangement connected to the external network is referred to herein as a ‘data sink’.
In order to provide satisfactory performance, the antenna arrangements must be deployed such that suitable coverage is provided to users via access links and also that high quality transit links exist between the antenna arrangements. Furthermore, the network topology should be arranged such that it is resilient to node and/or link failure and additionally that the link capacity provided is well matched to the traffic levels on each particular link.
At the moment, considerable radio frequency (RF) engineering experience is required in order to assess the quality of a mesh network topology. However, many of the new wireless mesh network products are intended for rapid and simple deployment by non-RF experts.